Trouble shooting my bathbombs (cracking)

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Foxfia

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Hi, I've been trying to learn the art of.. bath bombs! I've read so many forums about my issues so I'd just like to show someone them and see if I cant get better answers. I stopped trying to perfect my recipe awhile ago out of frustration with spherical bombs.. so I decided to just use different types of molds so they cant flatten like my sphere ones always would when I switched from corn starch to kaolin clay.

My base recipe is 1 cup BS, .5 cup citric acid, .25 cup of kaolin clay, .25 cup epsom sold, 1 tsp coconut oil. Earlier this week when I made them, I used all witch hazel to bind, and they would crack , I think it was too much moisture (I put them next to dehumidifier and they still felt damp on the bottom after 2 days) yesterday when I made them again, I decided to cut out the epsom salt ( but I did add it to the blue shells)

So yesterday I was going to try to use just 91% alcohol instead of witch hazel, but I used double the amount of witch hazel in alcohol and I wasnt getting the texture I wanted , so each half batch I made I sprayed the mixture 3 to 4 times with witch hazel and then 5 to 10 times with alcohol. The different colors show the different batches, the first one in upper left corner cracked terribly.. but that looks more like a dry crack right? Then the bottom right corner one I made from all the left over mix and i just doused it in alcohol to see what would happen and it didnt crack at all and it pretty freakin hard this morning ! I thought too much alcohol would have made it too moist, or does it take a lot of 91 alcohol to make it too moist?

Also curious as to why the red color (angry emoji and deer one) has a gross oily sticky texture on the outside but none of the others did? Could it be the fragrence i used?

Please and thank you!! Trying so hard to get this stuff down.
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You may be adding too much witchhazel and it's causing them to crack. Most witch hazel contains some water and too much water will cause them to crack. I use cocoa butter or shea butter and then spritz with alcohol if needed. I've not had them crack.
 
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